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How Did Christianity Triumph? Bart Ehrman Has a Theory || SLP678 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Who are the main competitors that Christians had to deal with?
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Well famous skeptic Bart Ehrman gives a natural explanation for the rise of Christianity, but I think he hints at a supernatural explanation.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: Let's check it out.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Who are the main competitors that Christians had to deal with in the early centuries of the movement?
0:20
SPEAKER_00: As they were spreading throughout the throughout the Roman world?
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'd say basically the answer is they didn't have any competitors.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: In terms of religions that were spreading throughout the Roman world, the Roman world was uh 95%, probably 93% pagan, which means that they were people worshipped many gods, they were polytheists.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: And they uh they were not no none of these religions were especially here to convert anybody because the whole point of polytheism is that you've got uh a number of different gods, all of whom deserve to be worshipped.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: And since they deserve to be worshipped, okay, you should worship them.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to worship only one god.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: The only religion with anything like a one god policy was Judaism.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: And Judaism, Jews were not eager to make converts, they were they were the chosen people, but they didn't think everybody else had to be the chosen people.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: If everybody else was, they wouldn't be the chosen people.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: And so I so Jews are not trying to convert anybody.
1:23
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1:28
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1:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh by the way, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
1:33
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1:34
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1:50
SPEAKER_01: Now, Bart Ehrman is talking about one aspect of why Christianity was able to rise in the first century and beyond in the ancient world.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: It's because they had no competition.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: They were moving into a market where there's no competition, they have monopoly power, they're the first mover, and that will confer advantage on them.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: And as he's going to say, if they convert people to their religion, well, not only are they growing their own religion, they're actually shrinking the competition, shrinking those who are out there.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: And so here is an attempted natural explanation for Christianity.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: I actually think that it hints at a supernatural explanation for Christianity.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: And to tell you why, I'm going to give you three illustrations and six distinctives of the early church that I think actually contributed to the rise of Christianity and to the extinction of paganism in so many ways.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: Three illustrations, six arguments.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: But first, let's hear Bart uh complete his thought.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: He's talked about how Judaism is not that interested in converting people into it.
2:53
SPEAKER_01: He's now going to talk about paganism.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: Pagan cults, there are a lot of pagan cults that would have been happy for people to join.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: And the Mithraists, uh, as an example, certainly like to have members in some of the mystery religion, like to have members, but they didn't they weren't competition for Christianity because if you converted to Mithraism, or if you um became a worshiper of Isis in one of the mystery cults, or of uh Dionysus, uh or take your pick, you didn't have to give up your other religions.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: In which case you weren't actually a convert.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: I think I think Bart actually misspoke at that point.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: You could become a new adherent to Mithras or Isis or those other mystery cults and religions.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: Um you weren't really a convert into those religions, is what he's saying.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: You just become a new adherent alongside all the other deities that you worship.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: And so these other no other religion is growing at the same time that it is shrinking the other religions.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: Christianity is the only one doing that.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: It's the only religion that is insisting that it's exclusively the right religion, uh, and that you need to, if you convert to it, you have to give up your other religions, and the only religion that's really eager to get everybody to convert.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Probably in part because of their views of the afterlife.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: There's one truth, uh, and that truth has eternal consequences, and so you need to uh follow that one truth.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: That's Christianity's line.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: There were not other religions uh saying that or believing it, and as a result, uh, Christianity, when it gained a convert, uh the other religions, the pagan religions, lost convert.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: And so uh they're destroying the other religions in their wake, and there's no other religion doing that.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: They are destroying the other religions.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: They are the destroyers of the gods, uh, which is the name of Larry Hurtado's great book about the rise of early Christianity.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: Now, what do we make of this as uh an explanation, a naturalistic explanation for why Christianity would take hold in the ancient world?
4:57
SPEAKER_01: They had no competitors, and so they've got monopoly power.
5:01
SPEAKER_01: They can come into a new market, it's theirs.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, I have to say that from a marketing point of view, there needs to be more than just lack of competitors before you're going to succeed in any market.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: The fact that there are no competitors out there might mean that your product is something that nobody wants or has thought to want.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: If I want to market a chocolate teapot, I might not have any competitors out there, but the reason I have no competitors out there is because nobody else wants a chocolate teapot, that is why nobody else is producing chocolate teapots.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: The fact that there is a lack of competitors is not really a competitive advantage for me yet.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: I need to be providing something that is unique.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: And actually, if the unique thing that I'm providing is that I insist on others converting to my new product, that does not at all necessarily confer competitive advantage on me.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: Imagine the scenario.
5:53
SPEAKER_01: Here's the first illustration I want to use.
5:55
SPEAKER_01: Imagine I want to get into streaming services.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: I want to have my own streaming platform.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to call it Scribflix.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: And on Scribflix, you can watch my unique content.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: It's not available anywhere else.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: But the one condition of you coming to Scribflix is that you need to demonstrate that you have deleted Netflix and Amazon Prime and Disney Plus and every other streaming platform from your devices.
6:19
SPEAKER_01: You need to cancel all your subscriptions to every other streaming platform.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: And only when I'm certain that you have left Netflix, you've left Amazon Prime, only then will I allow you to come into Scribflix.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: That is my winning strategy.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: To dominate the market of streaming platforms, do you think that is a recipe for success?
6:38
SPEAKER_01: No, of course that is not a recipe for success at all.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: And if I'm trying to get into a crowded marketplace, and Bart Ehrman has just told us that 93 to 95% of the ancient world was pagan, and a lot of the rest of them were Jews, so he's already told us that the market is absolutely saturated in people who, if they are interested in Christianity, just want to add it to the pantheon of gods that they already worship.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Christianity's conversionism might mean that in the long run, its successes mean the failure of its competition.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: But as a startup, this is not a winning strategy.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: Someone who really brought out the absurdity of what the early Christians were attempting is Peter Lighthart in his book Against Christianity.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: He's got a wonderful little sketch, an imagined dialogue of Peter, John, and Paul, and they are engaging the services of this market consultant that he has called Georgeus Barnes.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: Let me read you from some of this.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: Peter Lighthart's given me permission to do this.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: I think it's fantastic.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: Barnes says, I understand, gentlemen, that you want to start what we in the business call a new religious movement, or NRM for short.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
7:44
SPEAKER_01: John says, I suppose so.
7:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, I should tell you, the market is flooded.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: There are more religions on offer today than you can imagine, and just because you come from the east doesn't give you any edge.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: Lots of NRMs are coming from Persia and further east, and they're spilling over into Asia and as far as Rome.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you should consider some other line of business.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: Are you sure you can make it in this market?
8:02
SPEAKER_01: Peter says, But we have the truth.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: Those other religions serve false gods, and the living God has commissioned us to take good news to all men.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: Barnes says, Sure.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm a consultant, and I wanted to make sure that you knew what you were getting into.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: A little bit later, Barnes says, I'm suggesting that we think of the various religious options around the Roman world as a market in this metaphorical sense.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: All kinds of religious goods are being offered.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: There are different methods of payment and so on.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: We need to know where you fit in.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: What are you offering?
8:27
SPEAKER_01: Who is offering the same kinds of goods?
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Who is the competition?
8:30
SPEAKER_01: How do people pay?
8:31
SPEAKER_01: Is your price competitive?
8:32
SPEAKER_01: And then Barner says, You said you meet in houses.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: Maybe the thing to do is position yourself as an alternative to traditional household religions.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: That would be a tough market to get into.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: And he gets into the ancestor worship of household religions.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: And actually Peter, John, and uh Paul, they all say, Well, you know what, we do call each other brother and sisters, but we are a very different thing from the natural bonds of the human family.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: Paul says we are a household and a family, but we're not connected by blood.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: You see, Mr.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: Barnes, we have Jews and Gentiles in our gatherings and people from every land and tribe and tongue.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: That's part of the good news God wants us to preach.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: While we may be a household, we're a very unusual sort of household.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: So Barnes thinks again and says, Well, would you say that you're a client cult?
9:11
SPEAKER_01: And then he explains what a client cult is.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: A client cult is a specialty, you might say.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: Each God has a particular capability, say healing disease, and his priests are able to communicate that benefit to cult members.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: And Peter and Paul point out that Christians don't want others shopping around for various goods.
9:27
SPEAKER_01: They want actual converts to jump in with both feet to the Christian thing.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: And Barnes says, That's right.
9:33
SPEAKER_01: Client cults have adherence, but nobody converts to a client cult.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: And John says, And the gods of those cults are nothing like the god we serve, where apostles are the creator of all things, not a speciality god.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: He's one God, the only God, and he demands that we worship and serve him alone.
9:46
SPEAKER_01: Then Barnes says, Do you mean that you expect your members to abandon the other cults?
9:51
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: Well, you might want to reconsider that.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: That's a pretty steep price to pay.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: We may not be competitive.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: We'll take our chances, says John.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting?
10:00
SPEAKER_01: You're not competitive just because you have no competitors.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: If there's a very steep price to pay, you are not competitive, no matter whether the market is wide open for you or not.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, Barnes tries again, he says, What about mystery religions?
10:13
SPEAKER_01: You know those cults with secret initiation rituals and all that stuff about dying and rising with the gods, like Isis, for instance.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: They have a more communal feel to them, and they talk a lot about salvation for their worshippers.
10:24
SPEAKER_01: John ends up saying, We do have a rite of initiation that's all about dying and rising with Jesus, at least that's similar, and I've heard that some of those mystery religions actually wash their initiates just like in baptism.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: But then Paul points out, well, for us, baptism divides between us and the rest of the world.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: And Barnes says, Oh, this is fascinating.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: I brought up those religions first because I figured those would be the closest competitors, but this raises an interesting problem.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: Those are all private religions.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Maybe what you're proposing isn't a private religion at all.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you're talking about a new public religion.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: Like the Jews, Peter said.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: Exactly, says Barnes.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: Jews aren't a client cult or a mystery religion.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: Technically, legally, they form a politoma in many cities.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: A polychuma means a miniature city, a more or less self-governing community, a virtual city within the city.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: Paul says, That's exactly what we're after.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: We see ourselves as a new city within the city.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: We are transformed Israel, a people called to be Jews in a new way.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: Our groups are like colonies of a heavenly empire right in the middle of earthly cities.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, Judaism is definitely one of the leading competitors, says Barnes.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: John says, And don't forget the civic religions.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: That's what I first thought of when you mentioned public religions.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: Barnes is absolutely appalled at this stage.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: He says, So you're saying that you intend to enter the market of civic religions?
11:41
SPEAKER_01: John says, Sure, and don't forget emperor worship.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: Since Augustus is it is spread everywhere, and it's bestial.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: We intend to attack that too.
11:49
SPEAKER_01: Excuse me, says Barnus.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: Did you mention the imperial cult?
11:53
SPEAKER_01: That's right, says John.
11:54
SPEAKER_01: Do you mean that you're intending to compete with the Imperial cult?
11:57
SPEAKER_01: Paul says, Yes, we're sent to proclaim that there's another king, one Jesus.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: We preach that there's another empire, the kingdom of God which brings true peace on earth, not just the truce that Rome forces on people.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: Resistance to Rome and all its false and idolatrous claims is pretty central to what we're doing.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: Barnus says, You're talking about another king.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: Do you understand what this means?
12:16
SPEAKER_01: The imperial cult is backed up by the power of Rome.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not like you could take on Rome and win.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: Peter, John, and Paul together say, Why not?
12:26
SPEAKER_01: Gentlemen, I'm very sorry, says Barnus, I can't help you.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: You have completely misunderstood what we're doing here.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: I don't think you're starting another religion.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: You're doing something else entirely.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm a religious consultant, not a political revolutionary.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm afraid that we won't be able to work together.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: And Barnes gets up and leaves because a marketeer is not going to be able to make Christianity successful, even if it has no other competitors.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: The reason why it doesn't have a lot of competitors is like the reason why there's not much competition for chocolate teapots out there in the market.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: Simply having a lack of competitors does not in any way explain the success of someone who pioneers a path into a completely new market.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: How is that ever going to be successful?
13:06
SPEAKER_01: And Bart Ehrman points to one issue and he says, well, the afterlife.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Christians are offering people certainty about the afterlife, and that is a distinctive offering.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: And because the early Christians from a position of absolutely no power are offering an afterlife, therefore people would stop worshipping Mithras and Isis and stop burning incense to Caesar, or stop going to the client cults, or stop going to the priests to get favor for your crops to succeed.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: You will stop doing all that and you will come to the Christians because they're offering the afterlife.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: Well, okay, but except the other religions believe in the afterlife.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Socrates and Plato's Phido says the mortal portion of him may be supposed to die, but the immortal goes out of the way of death and is preserved safe and sound.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: And therefore in the Greco-Roman world, afterlife is definitely a thing, and it's a thing in all the mystery cults, and and Hades as a place of the dead, the underworld, the shadowy existence beyond our embodied life here, that is absolutely widespread in the ancient world.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: It's just that it is more like afterlife, as Bart Ehrman calls it.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: It is afterlife.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: Life is now in its embodied fullness, and however exalted any of the philosophers or the cults spoke of their afterlife, it is nothing like what the Christians offer, because Christianity is not about the afterlife.
14:29
SPEAKER_01: Afterlife is an awful word, as though we have life now, and then afterlife, there's this other thing.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: According to the Bible, we are pre-life.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: And actually, at the resurrection, then we will truly live.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: And that's the message of the early Christians.
14:45
SPEAKER_01: Irenaeus in Against Heresies would say in the second century, the resurrection promised to us should not be referred to spirits naturally immortal, but to bodies in themselves mortal.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: The Christians were not unique in offering an afterlife.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: They were unique in saying that actually it's not the soul that is immortal.
15:03
SPEAKER_01: Souls are created along with bodies, but we have an in souls bodily future.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: We have resurrection.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: That's what Christians proclaimed into the ancient world.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: And it was disgusting to the natural Greek mind to think that we would continue to be imprisoned within this body.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: The Greek word soma is quite like the word for prison, Sama.
15:23
SPEAKER_01: Soma is Sama.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: The body is a prison.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: And whatever afterlife was around, and it was being marketed by all the different cults and religions, whatever afterlife was being offered, it was a shadowy, not embodied, not physical existence.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: And Christians were offering something distinctive.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: That's right, I agree with Bart Ehrman about that.
15:41
SPEAKER_01: But the kind of hope that it gave to Christians created martyrs.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: Because if the ancient world was saying, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die, Christians were saying we can give our bodies in this life.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: For tomorrow we shall eat, drink, and be merry.
15:57
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, Christians were offering a distinctive view of afterlife, but it was bound up with a very distinctive practice of sacrificing yourself, pouring yourself out.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: And all Christians are called to be martyrs, it's just most of us get to do it in instalments.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: But in the early church, there were some prominent martyrs who laid down their lives all in one go.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: Irenaeus was actually converted by one of them called Polycarp.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: He himself heard the gospel from John.
16:23
SPEAKER_01: And Polycarp, when he was being put on trial, they said of him, This is the teacher of Asia, the father of the Christians, and the overthrower of our gods, the destroyer of gods, he who has been teaching many not to sacrifice or to worship the gods.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: So here is exactly what Ba Ehrman says is a competitive advantage for Christians.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: The competitive advantage for Christians is apparently that they insist on converting people from out of emperor worship and out of worshiping the gods.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: And Bart Ehrman says that that confers a competitive advantage on Christianity.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: And the history books say it made you into a martyr because as you were trying to deconvert people from the gods, you became public enemy number one.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: You were a threat to the civic order because religion and political life was woven together.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: So they say to Polycarp, swear by the fortune of Caesar, repent and say, Away with the atheists.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: See, Christians were called atheists because they just didn't believe in the other gods.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: And they were saying, forget Jupiter and Mars, come and worship Jesus.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: But Polycarp, gazing with a stern countenance and all the multitude of the wicked heathens, then in the stadium and waving his hand toward them, while with groans he looked up to heaven and said, Away with the atheists.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: Of course, he's not talking about Christians being atheists at that point.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: As his accusers were, he was talking about all the pagans being atheists.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: Then the proconsul urging him and saying, Swear and I will set you at liberty.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: Reproach Christ.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: All you need to do is burn a little bit of incense to Caesar.
17:47
SPEAKER_01: Polycarp won't do it.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: He declared, Eighty and six years have I served him, and he never did me any injury.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: How then can I blaspheme my king and my savior, and he became a martyr?
17:57
SPEAKER_01: The Christian vision for things created martyrs.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: It created martyrs because they were a threat to the social, political, cultural order of the day by not worshipping the gods, and it created martyrs because Polycarp recognized that he could eat, drink, and be merry when he died, and he could give his life in martyrdom.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: So the the first thing that made Christians distinctive, I think Bart Ehrman is correct, that their views of the afterlife are radically different, but that does not instantly confer competitive advantage on Christianity.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: Let me point to five other distinctives about the early church and then finish with one final illustration.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: But uh the second distinctive, I think, is right here in the martyrdom story of Polycarp, and it's something that Bart Ehrman spoke of, there is one God.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: The difference between the paganism of the day and the one God of Israel was an infinite qualitative distinction.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: And it put the Christians at real odds with not only the religions of the day, but just how do you get on in life when every single contract that you will make as a trader or an artisan is going to involve the gods at some stage.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: But the Christians refused to take part in that, which was an incredible cost.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: It was an incredible cost for them not to be involved in the paganism, in the polytheism of their day.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: It made them atheists, it made them threatening to the social and cultural and political order of the day, and it made some of them into martyrs.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: Um, interesting about the pagans calling Christians atheists, a really famous account of it is when Emperor Julian, who kind of reverted back to paganism after the Roman Empire had had some Christian emperors, Emperor Julian reverts back to paganism, and he writes a letter to a priest in Galatia, and he says, When it came about that the poor were neglected and overlooked by our priests, then I think the impious Galileans, that is Christians, observed this fact and devoted themselves to philanthropy, and they have gained ascendancy in the worst of their deeds through the credit they win for such practices.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: The Galileans also begin with their so-called love feasts or hospitality or service of tables, for they have many ways of carrying it out and hence called by many names, and the result is that they have led very many into atheism.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: So here is a third real distinctive of Christianity.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: They had a very distinctive love ethic.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: Larry Hurtado says in The Destroyer of the Gods, it's very hard.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: I've not been able actually to find any statements in Roman era pagan religious texts about the gods loving the world or loving people, and then he goes on to say, Christians had this idea of God so loving them that they are to pass it on to others.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: And while the pagans had images of God in their temples that they burnt incense to, Christians, when they worshipped, got around the table and there are no images of God at a Christian worship service, or are there?
20:52
SPEAKER_01: Actually, in the Clementine homilies in the fourth century, there's this brilliant sermon about how the pagans serve the images of their gods in their way just by burning a bit of incense to them.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: But Christians serve the image of God in their neighbor.
21:07
SPEAKER_01: And in this way, it is bread to the hungry and it's clothing to the naked and it's visiting the imprisoned, and that is how they pass on the love of God to others.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: They don't serve images of a statue of a god, they serve people, and this love ethic absolutely overturned the ancient world.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's fascinating that somebody else who tried to give a very naturalistic explanation for the rise of Christianity was Rodney Stark, and as a sociologist, he kind of did the numbers and he just said, well, if you start with just a handful of people in the first century, and if you get to 312 AD, where Constantine kind of converts to Christianity, and there seemed to be maybe 10% of the Roman Empire were Christian by that stage.
21:49
SPEAKER_01: Well, over those 300 years, you actually only need to have, I think it was 3.4% growth of the church year on year on year on year.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: And of course, the thing with Compound interest is that it really does exponentially grow, but you just need 3.4% of the church to grow year on year on year on year.
22:08
SPEAKER_01: So people who are keen for just natural explanations for the rise of Christianity, they just latch onto that one thing by Rodney Stark to say, oh, that's all you need to do.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: You just need to grow by 3.4% for them, and then you'll overtake the Roman Empire, which leaves a lot of things unexplained.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, why did the cult of Mithras not grow by 3.4%?
22:25
SPEAKER_01: Why did the cult of Isis not grow by 3.4%?
22:27
SPEAKER_01: There is definitely something else going on, and actually Rodney Stark pointed to this issue of the love ethic, actually.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: The early Christians were sneered at by the cultured Romans like Celsus, who said Christianity is just a religion for slaves, women, and children.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: And Rodney Stark is one that allowed why every woman in the Roman Empire did not become a Christian because of the love ethic that they had and the dignity that was afforded to every member of the household within the Christian church.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: So that's the third distinctive, the love ethic.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: There's also a fourth distinctive I want to draw attention to.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: It's the sexual ethic.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: And Kyle Harper's book From Shame to Sin does a wonderful job of showing what a revolution it was in the understanding of sex, sexuality, men and women.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: Harper writes the complete violent exploitation of women without any claim to civic protection was simply, as a problem in its own right, invisible to Greco-Roman culture, invisible in a culture whose moral foundations were imminent in the logic of social reproduction.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: And the claims of elite men to the bodies of their so-called inferiors, be they women, slaves, concubines, prostitutes, boys, whatever it is, elite men were claiming the possession of everyone else within Roman society.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: And there was an absolute and unabashed double standard between men and women, and men could get away with things that women never could.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: And Christianity comes along and says, no, there is one sexual ethic for male and female, and men were being constrained in their sexual expression to be as restrictive in their sexuality as we had always expected women to be.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: There was an absolute egalitarian sexual ethic, and it was absolutely transformative in the ancient world, and it was just such a costly revolution to join the Christian church in those early centuries.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: When everything in the Greco-Roman world is libido, and Christians are saying, no, we we reserve sex for a marriage between one man and one woman, the doors are locked, and nobody gets out of that thing alive.
24:27
SPEAKER_01: You're welcome, come on in.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: Like this built an incredibly fruitful, prosperous society.
24:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, but the costs on coming in and being an early adopter of this sexual ethic were vast.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: The Christian revolution created martyrs and it created virgins.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: And both those things were a rebellion against the natural order because just in a purely Darwinian frame, we we need to survive and reproduce, right?
24:54
SPEAKER_01: And what are martyrs and virgins doing?
24:56
SPEAKER_01: They are not surviving and not reproducing.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: And it struck the ancient world as hideously and ridiculously unnatural, but Christians persisted in this.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: Is there a market for this kind of thing in the ancient world?
25:10
SPEAKER_01: The Christians had no competitors, but did that confer on them competitive advantage?
25:14
SPEAKER_01: Well, yet maybe in the long run.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: But why were there any early adopters of this new technology called Christianity?
25:21
SPEAKER_01: Why were there any early adopters in the first instance?
25:24
SPEAKER_01: It's a radically different vision for death and what's beyond and the afterlife.
25:29
SPEAKER_01: It is a radically different vision for God and the gods.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: It's a radically different vision for self-giving love as the great ethic out there in the world.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: It's a radically different vision of sex, sexuality, marriage, and family.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: Fifthly, it's a radically different vision of fate and the way the universe operates.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: For most of the thinkers of the ancient worlds, fate was such a power that even the gods danced to the tune of fate.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: And yet suddenly in Christianity there's this birth of people who start believing in freedom, and they believe in freedom because there's a God who is above the gods and a god who is above fate.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: There is a God who is free and a God who confers freedom on his children.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, a different vision of God and a different vision of sex is the context in which the language of free will emerged.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: Kyle Harper in his book, From Shame to Sin about sex, says free will was born in the struggle to define the meaning of Christian sexual morality.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: How are those two things linked?
26:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, the Greco-Roman world was just telling you you have a biological duty and a sociocultural duty, and sex is just woven into the preservation of the species, but also the preservation of culture.
26:38
SPEAKER_01: It's just woven into, and so there is the most biological as well as the most sociocultural kind of impetus to simply let your libido loose.
26:47
SPEAKER_01: And Christians say, I'm standing above this.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: I don't have to do this.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: I'm free.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: And literally the phrase free will was first used in these kinds of conversations about how Christians had the ability to say no to their lusts.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: And Christians lived out this very different kind of a life.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: Free from fate.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: And then finally, sixthly, I'm going to talk about free from shame.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: Shame is bound up in your place within society and the eyes that are on you that might make you feel honor or shame.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: But if there's a God above that whole system who counts me as his child, then suddenly I can start to think of myself as an individual who first needs to deal with that relationship with God.
27:31
SPEAKER_01: And if I tilt away from thinking merely in terms of shame and I start thinking in terms of sin, then I'm a morally culpable agent before God, and I can walk with a certain sense of freedom.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: And if I can get that sin problem dealt with, then I can walk free from shame out there in the world.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: That's a true freedom.
27:49
SPEAKER_01: But where does it really come from?
27:50
SPEAKER_01: Well, it really comes from the Son of God who was crucified in ignominy for us, who entered into our shame, to forgive us of our guilt so that we now can be clothed in Christ and walk through the world with head held high.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: But the pathway to me being free from shame is to embrace the most shameful thing that has ever happened.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: That's Jesus Christ crucified on the cross.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: It was the most shameful way you could possibly die.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: And Christians were just proclaiming it from the outset.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: And it was so nonsense, it was so bonkers, but it was so beautiful.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: But you needed to embrace the bonkersness of it in order to get the beauty of it.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: Tatalion put this really well and quite famously.
28:32
SPEAKER_01: He said, The Son of God was crucified.
28:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm not ashamed because it is shameful.
28:38
SPEAKER_01: The Son of God died, it is immediately credible because it is silly.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: He was buried and rose again, it is certain because it is impossible.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: Christianity gets off the ground when people proclaim Jesus Christ and him crucified, and it's the most shameful thing that the Greco-Roman mind could ever wrap itself around.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: And somehow it creates a bunch of people who embrace that, and on the far side of embracing the crucified one, they find a freedom from shame and a freedom from fate, and they they find a new way to be family together, and they find a new way to love, and they find a God who is free and above all the squabbling deities that they'd been subject to, and they find an eternal life, yes, but it's an eternal life that's so different to everything that's been offered.
29:25
SPEAKER_01: And it all comes, first of all, by embracing Christ and him crucified.
29:30
SPEAKER_01: Out of that death comes that resurrection.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: And here is the final illustration that I want to give to you, and I'm borrowing it from N.T.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: Wright.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: He says that the early church growing and taking over the world is the most astonishing expansion.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: And he likens it to the expanding universe.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: You know how we ever came up with the idea of a big bang?
29:51
SPEAKER_01: We came up with the idea of a big bang because we saw an expanding universe, and we inferred from that that, well, if you wind back the clock, I guess there must have been a singularity from which this expansion has happened.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: There must have been a bang, right?
30:06
SPEAKER_01: If you see the expansion, there must have been an explosion.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: And you can do the same thing with the rise of Christianity.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: There was this phenomenal expansion of Christianity that happened and it continued long after Constantine, and it continues to overtake the world.
30:21
SPEAKER_01: It's the greatest sociological phenomenon the world has ever seen.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: And Bart Ehrman agrees with that.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: He says in the triumph of Christianity, whether the Christianization of the West was a triumph to be treasured or a defeat to be lamented, no one can deny.
30:32
SPEAKER_01: It was the most monumental cultural transformation our world has ever seen.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: There has been an incredible expansion.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: Where was the explosion?
30:41
SPEAKER_01: Christians say the explosion happened on that very weekend where Jesus Christ was crucified.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: And that from the greatest shame and ignominy and death, the most unpromising beginning, out of nothing, came everything.
30:57
SPEAKER_01: It's a big bang.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: Because Christianity was dead and buried on Good Friday.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: And then it seemed to be alive somehow, and it has taken over the world.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: And Christians say the best explanation for Christianity rising from the dead and taking over the world is that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and reigns over this world.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: And as we say that, we're not offering that as one more absurd truth to be believed.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: We are saying this as a potential explanation for what would otherwise be absurd.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: And I think what would otherwise be absurd is the idea that Christians would get into the religion markets and that they would be successful because there are no other competitors in this market.
31:38
SPEAKER_01: I don't think Bart's natural explanation for Christianity works in this very short video.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, in his latest book, he presses into the supernatural quality of the Christian community.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: They don't do what nature does, which is just to look after your kin and to pound the enemy.
31:55
SPEAKER_01: Christians live by a love ethic of love thy stranger.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's a more fruitful way of looking into an explanation for the rise of Christianity.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: But I think even that is something super natural.
32:07
SPEAKER_01: What is natural is to love your kith and kin.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: What goes above the natural is to love thy stranger.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: I think that's pointing towards something supernatural going on.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, Rodney Stark, who gave the 3.4% per annum figure for how the early church might have taken over the Roman Empire, as he presses into what those early Christians were like, it started him on a journey to faith for himself because he recognized that there was something going on super naturally.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: Is that something that you want to investigate for yourself?
32:39
SPEAKER_01: We got a great way of investigating Christianity for you.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: It's called 321.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: You can go to 321course.com.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: It's totally free and it gives you life according to Jesus.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: You can binge it in a couple of hours or do it over eight episodes.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: Go to 321course.com.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: Well, that'll do us for this video.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: If you've gotten this far in the video, it certainly deserves a like, wouldn't you say?
32:57
SPEAKER_01: And uh why don't you think about who you can share it with and hit subscribe so that we can catch you on the next video.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: God bless.